


a stomach churning shift in the way the land lies

by bestliars



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: M/M, Minnesota Wild, Nashville Predators, written while listening to the mountain goats
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-03
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-07-11 22:08:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7072414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bestliars/pseuds/bestliars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing that most people don’t realize about when Ryan left is that it was for the best.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a stomach churning shift in the way the land lies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thesaddestboner](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesaddestboner/gifts).



> for Lostcoastlines, cause I said I was listening to “No Children” on repeat while writing this ship, and then she spent the rest of the night sending me lyrics from Tallahassee. It was great/hurt a lot. The title is from “First Few Desperate Hours” by the Mountain Goats.
> 
> I wrote this ages ago, and then forgot about it. Unbetaed.

Ryan and Shea were a couple in a way where everybody knew about it, but it was never discussed. Their coupledom was clear to the team, but just as clearly it was not a topic for conversation. They were a couple outside of conversation.

They were a couple who did not have conversations; or at least not conversations about being a couple. At no point in their relationship did they ever have a conversation about what they were doing.

That’s probably how it got so bad.

 

 

The thing that most people don’t realize about when Ryan left is that it was for the best. It hurt like hell, but by then it was the best thing that could have happened.

It didn't have to turn out like that. They could have made different choices earlier on. They could have stopped and thought about what they were doing and actually made choices, instead of doing things and waiting to see what happened. That might have helped, but by the time Ryan left there was nothing left to save, or at least that’s how it felt.

It felt like it would hurt a lot less to leave than to fix what they had. At least that's what it felt like to Ryan, and he was the one who had a way out. 

Shea mostly felt tired. 

He was tired of being together without talking: tired of saying nothing, tired of all their shit. He was too tired to imagine an ending. He was tired, but that was just how things were. They played hard until they got knocked out of the playoffs. By the end of the season Shea got so tired he couldn’t look anyone in the eye. He got so tired, he would go home, and lie in bed next to Ryan, and they wouldn’t touch. That's the way things were. It was always better by the next fall. 

At least it was better last year, and the year before, and the year before. 

Then Ryan had to fuck it up and leave. After that Shea had no idea what it would be like in the fall. He was still so tired. 

So tired, and life didn't stop. He signed the offer sheet because it seemed like a good idea, or at least like not the worst. Nashville matched, and he didn't mind. He had accepted spending the rest of his career there; he had just figured it would be with Ryan. They would both re-sign, play together all year, get frustrated and tired, and then things would be better in the fall. That worked, more or less. Shea thought it worked alright. He had been willing to keep going like that. 

 

 

To people who knew about them as a couple Ryan leaving came completely out of the blue. Sure, maybe Sutes and Webs had been a little bit rough at the end of the playoffs, but they were Sutes and Webs. They were partners. They were going to work it all out; they belonged together. No one saw it coming.

Absolutely no one.

Ryan didn’t really think he was going to leave.

Shea didn’t have a clue.

Their problems didn’t appear out of nowhere, but no one saw them getting fixed like this.

At the end of June Ryan sat down and thought about where he wanted to play next year. It would have been so easy to go back to Nashville. He could have signed an extension, and kept playing with Shea, and they would have had all the same problems. Shea would sign an extension too and they’d both be locked in playing for Nashville until they were too worn down to play anywhere. Maybe by then they would have been down to one house instead of two, one house for them to share with all their dogs. Ryan wanted to be settled down by the time he was done playing. If he signed in Nashville he’d be signing on to stay with Shea, to keep living in the mess they had built for themselves.

It was a tempting possibility. They had built a very nice mess. Squint right and looked a lot like a home. They could have cleaned it up, straightened it out, and it might have gotten comfortable. They might have been able to make it work.

Instead he took the chance to get away, and signed in Minnesota, to settle down with Zach Parise, who winds up being the love of his life.

“Love of your life” is such an odd expression. It assumes one life, and one love, which isn’t always true. Ryan left for Minnesota, to start a new life, with a new love, leaving Shea behind in the remains of the mess they had built.

 

 

Ryan seemed better off at the end because he was the one who left. He was the one to say, “This is it, we’re over.” He was the one to leave Shea behind. He packed up, and moved on right away, to a pretty-boy hometown hero. That’s what it seemed like anyway.

Half-true. Good enough. He had a future to get started on. That didn’t erase the last six years of playing with Shea, sleeping with Shea, practically living with Shea, arguing with Shea, and not talking about his problems with Shea. It didn’t change how it felt like he cut off his own arm, making himself useless, bleeding everywhere.

But it seemed like he was fine. He had Zach, who was kind, and sexy, and kind of messy, and something to hold onto. Ryan signed with Minnesota knowing that him and Zach could be happy together. He had hoped it would be instantaneous, that it would just _work_ , that everything would be good right away. 

He wasn’t exactly surprised when that wasn’t possible, but he had hoped. It was an awkward transition, and the lockout made things worse, but they started to figure things out, together. Even at their roughest it was still better than the end of things in Nashville, but that isn’t saying much. It would be hard to get much worse than how things ended in Nashville.

Shea managed that though. Ryan left, and then he didn’t have anyone. Well, he had the dogs, and the team, and a city who was on his side because he was the one who stayed. But he didn’t have Ryan, and nothing had meant as much as Ryan had. That was one of their problems.

 

 

Being in love isn’t the same thing as being happy, but it helps. 

 

 

Ryan built a new life in Minnesota. Ryan knew how to have conversations with Zach, they had been having conversations since they were sixteen. They had a conversation about their future before they signed together. They made a plan. In the fall Ryan moved into Zach’s house in the cities. They got settled in as they waited for the lockout to end.

 

 

Shea spent the lockout at his house in Sicamous. He got to spend a lot of time with his dad. They took the dogs on long walks. 

It was good. It gave him some time, to not be back in Nashville, to not be in the house he shared with Ryan. At home in Sicamous he could pretend that nothing had changed — it was only a long summer, stretching into fall. He could still imagine going back to Nashville and finding that things were just the same. The longer the lockout lasted the harder it was to pretend, but Shea was motivated to keep trying. He didn’t have a better plan to deal with it.

 

 

And then the lockout was over, and it was time to get back to work. Shea headed back to Nashville to tried to work around the empty space. Ryan and Zach had a week to get used to new teammates and a new system — at least they had each other.

The Wild won their first two games. The Predators lost their first two. 

The Predators came to Minnesota for game three.

This was the first time Ryan and Shea were in the same place since the end of the Preds season. It was the first time Shea was on the same ice as Zach in more than a year — the first time since he decided Zach was someone he wanted to hate.

Zach wasn’t the other woman. He didn’t steal Ryan way — Ryan left, but it would be a whole lot easier for Shea to blame their problems on someone else coming between them than it would be to take a step back and take ownership of his role in their destruction. There wasn’t one good reason why he shouldn’t hate Zach Parise.

He prefered to keep lying to himself, repeating that they really had been happy together in Nashville. That had been true, at one point, but not in the end. By the end it was already an old lie: sweet and fitting but false.

The Preds won, narrowly. It was three-one, with an empty net goal at the end. It wasn’t their best name, but Mason stepped up and had a real good night. Parise had six shots but none went in. No one gets to be lucky all the time. Shea didn’t go out of his way to finish his checks, Parise was just always there. Shea was only doing his job, clearing the crease. The interference penalty he took was worth it. They killed the penalty. The Wild couldn’t score. Ryan was on the ice for both of the Predator’s goals. Minus two. Shea wasn’t responsible for the kid playing with Ryan being dumb enough to block one of Shea’s shots with his foot. Ryan could have warned the kid. Shea’s done caring about Ryan’s mistakes.

He had moved on. At least that’s what he was telling himself.

Shea wanted to be happy after the game. They won, he deserved to be happy. They were spending another night in Saint Paul after the game, not flying to Saint Louis until the next afternoon. Shea wanted to be happy after the game, but he didn’t want to go out and celebrate, not in this city. 

Instead he went back to his hotel room, alone. They didn’t have to share rooms anymore, which was good. It meant Shea didn’t have to get used to sharing space with someone who wasn’t Ryan. He might not have been able to do that. It was better to be alone — then there’s no one to judge his misery.

He was alone, and felt unsettled. There was no one he could share this feeling with. Yeah, he had a whole team, but a room full of good guys is really nothing after having one person who meant the most. He felt empty. He wanted to feel righteous about winning. He wanted to be able to use this as proof that Ryan made a huge mistake by leaving Nashville, by leaving him, but he couldn’t — not when he it left him feeling so empty. 

Nothing in the minibar could get rid of the bitter taste in his mouth. He wanted to enjoy his win, not just Ryan’s defeat.

A part of him still loved Ryan, and was uncomfortable to wanting Ryan to lose, but he _did_ , he really did. He wanted to see Ryan miserable and broken, just like him.

But that’s not how it works. Ryan had moved on.


End file.
